My topics are consciousness. The plural is
deliberate.
Both in philosophy and in psychology, “the problem
of consciousness” is supposed to be very special. And the past fifteen
years have seen an explosion of work on “it” by philosophers, psychologists,
and neuroscientists as well. Besides the individual journal articles
and books, there is now a vigorous Journal of Consciousness Studies;
and John Benjamins Publishing Company’s book series, Advances in Consciousness
Research, is flourishing and includes some excellent works.
But if we look closely at some sample texts, we
are struck by an astonishing diversity of topics that have gone under the
heading of “consciousness.”

1. Here is one sample text. Martin Davies
and Glyn Humphreys begin the Introduction to their acclaimed anthology,
Consciousness
(1993), as follows.

Consciousness is, perhaps, the aspect of our mental lives that
is the most perplexing, for both psychologists and philosophers.
The Macmillan Dictionary of Psychology contains as its entry for
consciousness:
‘the having of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings; awareness. The
term is impossible to define except in terms that are unintelligible without
a grasp of what consciousness means’ (Sutherland, 1989, p. 90). [For
whatever reason, Davies and Humphreys chose not to quote the entry’s concluding
sentence: ‘Nothing worth reading has been written on it.’] On the
side of philosophy, Daniel Dennett notes in The Oxford Companion to
the Mind that consciousness ‘is both the most obvious and the most
mysterious feature of our minds’ (Gregory, 1987, p. 160); and Thomas Nagel
famously remarks (1974, p. 166), ‘Without consciousness the mind-body problem
would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless.’
These remarks might suggest that consciousness—indefinable
and mysterious—falls outside the scope of rational enquiry, defying both
scientific and philosophical investigation. But, in fact, the topic
spans the history of psychology from William James until the present; and
the past fifteen or twenty years have also seen an upsurge of philosophical
interest in the place of consciousness in the natural order. [p.
1]

These paragraphs assume, or seem to, that there is this
one thing, consciousness (that is elusive and hard to define and perhaps
outside the scope of rational enquiry). The authors later go on to
qualify that idea, distinguishing some notions that are so different as
to have little to do with each other. But there are still many readers
who would be taken in by those opening paragraphs if they didn’t read further.
And in fact, the anthologized essays are a grab-bag;
some of them bear no discernible relation to others. The collection
contains (besides philosophical articles on the distinct(!) topics of awareness,
qualia, and subjectivity), “Theory and Measurement in the Study of Unconscious
Processes,” “Impairments of Visual Awareness,” “Freud’s Cognitive Psychology
of Intention: The Case of Dora,” and “The Intentionality of Animal Action.”
Brian Smith once said of computation that it “is a site, not a subject-matter”;
“consciousness” is a flea market or jumble sale, not even a site.

2. By way of complaining about philosophers’
habitual logic-chopping, distinction-mongering, verbal disputation, etc.,
my psychologist friend Paul Schulman once told me, “We don’t care what
anything is called; we just wanna measure it.” Damned
right, too; what does it matter which problems have been called “consciousness”?
Philosophers should not care what the distinct problems are called either.
But everyone ought to care that they are distinct. Conflation
of them is not merely a theoretical possibility. It has occurred,
over and over again, resulting in countless confusions and errors.
I urge us all to keep the distinct problems distinct. Not only will
confusion and error thereby be avoided; I argue that if we divide we shall
conquer.
Some of the topics and issues that have gone under
the heading of “consciousness” are brutely empirical. Some are more
abstractly theoretical. Some are outright philosophical and conceptual.
I myself see these differences as differences of degree only, but they
are still differences. One important difference, though far from
the only one, is that of “how does” questions from “how possibly” questions--e.g.,
“How does a human subject/brain accomplish such-and-such a task?,” vs.
“How could any theory of kind so-and-so possibly explain this refractory
feature of human experience?” or “How could a mere information-processing
system possibly have properties of this remarkable sort?”
Scientists sometimes pay lip service to one notorious
“how possibly” question or another, and even voice that question in a tone
of awed respect, but then proceed to announce that what we need is more
information-processing models, or more neuroscience, ignoring the theoretical
obstacle that drives the “how possibly” question, the obstacle that makes
the relevant achievement seem impossible.2 For example, all too often we hear it suggested
that advances in neuroscience will solve Thomas Nagel’s (1974) and Frank
Jackson’s (1982) conceptual problem of “knowing what it’s like”—or even
that advances in neuroscience have solved it. This is grievously
confused. For Nagel’s and Jackson’s claim is precisely that there
is an irreducible kind of phenomenal knowledge that cannot be revealed
by science of any kind. Nagel’s and Jackson’s respective “Knowledge
Arguments” for this radical thesis are purely philosophical; they contain
no premises that depend on scientific fact. Now, either the arguments
are unsound or they are sound. If they are unsound, then so far as
has been shown, there is no such irreducible knowledge, and neither science
nor anything else is needed to produce it. But if the arguments are
sound, they show that no amount of science could possibly help to produce
the special phenomenal knowledge.3 Either way, neither
neuroscience nor any other science is pertinent.
And in general, no appeal to normal science is going
to answer any philosopher’s “how possibly” question, though it might happen
that some hidden corner of normal science would lessen the force of such
a question.

3. Here are some of the topics and issues that have gone under
the “c-” heading.

Consciousness as opposed to unconsciousness (the “normal waking
state”).

So far, these topics are all empirical, or at least
toward the empirical end of the spectrum. Some, like the temporal
anomalies, are of more philosophical interest than others.4
But now here are some more abstract and theoretical ones.

State/event consciousness: A state of
a subject, or an event occurring within the subject, is a conscious as
opposed to an unconscious or subconscious state or event iff the
subject is aware of being in the state / hosting the event.
In virtue of what is the subject aware of some of her/his own mental goings-on
but unaware of others?
Introspection and introspective awareness,
and privileged access to the internal character of one's experience itself.
I am directly or “directly” aware of my own experience, or some of it,
in a way that you cannot be; that needs explaining.
Qualia (strictly so called): The monadic,
first-order qualitative features of apparent phenomenal objects.
When you are experiencing a yellowy-orange after-image, what exactly is
it that has the yellowy-orange color? For that matter, when you are
(veridically) seeing a ripe banana, there is a corresponding yellow patch
in your visual field. What ontological account is to be given of
the yellowness of that patch (which might be as it is even if the banana
were not real)? Bertrand Russell took it to be obvious, in need of
no argument at all, that the bearers of such phenomenal color properties
are nonphysical individuals, “sense data” as he called them; for impressive
argument in addition, see Jackson (1977).
Homogeneity or grainlessness: The smooth
continuous character of a phenomenal quality such as color, as contrasting
with the discrete, particulate nature of the material of which we are made.
The after-image is entirely yellowy-orange, yellowy-orange through and
through, without gaps, and it has no part that is not yellowy-orange.
But nothing in the physical world has no part that is not yellowy-orange.
(Sellars, 1962, 1965, 1971.)
The intrinsic perspectivalness, point-of-view-iness,
and/or first-personishness of experience, as discussed by Gunderson
(1970), Nagel (1974) and others. In one way or another, our experience
of our own mental states requires the adopting of a very special point
of view; our experience of our external environment, though invariably
from a point of view, is not perspectival in the same, deeper way.
Funny facts, or special phenomenal knowledge
as allegedly revealed by the “Knowledge Arguments” mentioned above.
It seems that the facts must be nonphysical facts.
The ineffability of “what it’s like” (in
the higher-order sense): One often cannot express in words what it
is like to have a particular sensation. What is it like to experience
the yellowy-orange of a yellowy-orange after-image? (It’s yellowy-orange,
yes, I heard you the first time; but can you tell someone in intrinsic,
not comparative, terms, what it’s like to experience visual yellowy-orange?)
The “explanatory gap” called to our attention
by Joseph Levine (1983, 1993): Even if God were to assure us that,
say, the Type-Identity Theory of mind is true and that such-and-such a
conscious experience is strictly identical with a firing of certain neural
fibers, we would still lack an explanation of why those fiber firings feel
to their subjects in the distinctive way they do. Indeed, to Levine
it seems “arbitrary” that they do.

4. Psychologists and (especially) philosophers
have tended to think of “consciousness” in the same mental breath as “phenomenal
experience.” But notice that phenomenal experience is necessarily
involved only in the last six of the foregoing issues, and has nothing
intrinsically to do with any of the others. (I shall call the last
six, qualia-strictly-so-called through the explanatory gap, “the problems
of phenomenal experience.”) Just those six are perhaps a daunting
array.
Theories “of consciousness” have been offered by
cognitive psychologists (Mandler (1985), Baars (1988), Shallice (1988a,
1988b), Johnson-Laird (1988), Schacter (1989), Kosslyn and Koenig (1992)),
and by neuroscientists (Edelman (1989, 1992); Crick and Koch (1990)).
Philosophers have put forward others: D.M. Armstrong’s (1968, 1981) Lockean
“inner sense” theory, David Rosenthal’s (1993) Higher-Order Thought theory,
D.C. Dennett’s (1991) Multiple Drafts theory. However, the key thing
to grasp about all of these is that not one of them even addresses
any of the six problems of phenomenal experience. I am not speaking
pejoratively and I do not mean my previous assertion as a criticism of
any of the theories. Some of their creators did not really
aim them at any of the six problems, even though they paid lip service
as recorded above. Others, particularly the philosophers, did not
even superficially intend them to address the six problems. The theories
were aimed at different phenomena and may be admirable explanations of
those phenomena.
I draw two morals: First, no one should claim
that problems of phenomenal experience have been solved by any purely cognitive
or neuroscientific theory. (I find myself in surprising agreement
with Chalmers (1996) on that.) Second and perhaps more importantly,
the theories cannot fairly be criticized for failing to illuminate problems
of phenomenal experience. And many of them have been so criticized,
e.g., by Chalmers (1996).5 Armstrong’s and Rosenthal’s
theories, in particular, are very explicitly theories of awareness
and of privileged access, not theories of qualia or of subjectivity or
of “what it’s like.” (In fact, both Armstrong and Rosenthal offer
theories of qualia, but quite different theories, and elsewhere (Armstrong
(1968, 1999), Rosenthal (1991)). Never criticize a philosophical
theory for not explaining X unless the theory is either a theory of X or
a theory of something which essentially includes X--at least not when its
proponent quite rationally disavows concern for X.

5. It is the problems of phenomenal experience
that have most greatly exercised philosophers, often under the heading
“‘the’ problem of phenomenal experience.” But even once we
have split off the six from the preceding ten and more, we must continue
to distinguish and divide. Much harm has resulted, within philosophy,
from conflating among the six themselves. To make progress, we must
take them one at a time.
For the record--well, not only for it--I will note
my own positions on each of the six problems,6 and then
conclude with a remark on why the positions are dialectically important.
Qualia (strictly so called): I am what
has come to be called a Representationalist about the qualitative features
of apparent phenomenal objects. When you see a (real) ripe banana
and there is a corresponding yellow patch in your visual field, the yellowness
“of” the patch is, like the banana itself, a representatum, an intentional
object of the experience. The experience represents the banana and
it represents the yellowness of the banana, and the latter yellowness
is all the yellowness that is involved; there is no mental patch that is
itself yellow. If you were only hallucinating a banana, the unreal
banana would still be a representatum, but now an intentional inexistent;
and so would be its yellowness. The yellowness would be as it is
even though the banana were not real. Likewise, when you experience
a yellowy-orange after-image, you visually represent a colored spot in
real physical space, and the yellowy-orange is the represented spot’s represented
color.
Homogeneity or grainlessness: Here
I would appeal to the Representational theory of qualia, and point out
that vision does not represent smoothly colored physical objects as having
gaps in color. (It is a further and interesting question whether
this is tantamount to vision’s representing the objects as having no gaps
in color.)
The intrinsic perspectivalness, point-of-view-iness,
and/or first-personishness of experience: I defend an “inner
sense” theory of awareness and introspection that I swiped from Armstrong
(1968, 1981). On this view, introspection is much like internal perception,
and (like any mode of perception) gives you a unique and partial perspective
on what you are perceiving. Indeed, I hold that introspection is
the operation of an internal scanner or monitor, that produces representations
of your first-order mental states themselves, representations that are
made of concepts peculiar to the monitoring device. The blind men
and the elephant are representing the same thing very differently, so differently
that they do not, perhaps cannot realize that what they are representing
is the same as what each of the other men are representing. Similarly,
seeing an event and hearing the same event may be nothing alike.
And introspecting what is in fact a neural event is not a bit like seeing
that same event as from outside one’s head, using mirrors. Your introspective
device deploys very distinctive concepts of its own. These features
of the introspector combine, I hold, to explain the intrinsic perspectivalness
of the mental as such: The mental as such is the neural, not as such,
but as viewed from the unique introspective perspective.
Funny facts and special phenomenal knowledge:
I believe that there is special phenomenal knowledge. Jackson’s (1982)
character Mary the color-blind color scientist knows all the objective,
physical facts about color and color perception, but when cured of her
malady she herself experiences colors for the first time, and learns a
new fact, the fact of what it is (actually) like to see red. On my
view, the sense in which this is a new fact is that fine-grained sense
according to which “facts” are not merely chunks of spacetime, but incorporate
modes of presentation, or concepts under which the relevant chunks of spacetime
are represented: thus, in this sense, that water is splashing and that
H2O molecules are moving in such-and-such a way are different “facts,”
though in a more obvious coarse-grained sense they are one and the same
fact. In the fine-grained sense, that I weigh 200 pounds and that
WGL does are different facts; that the meeting begins at noon and that
it begins five minutes from now are different facts; etc. In none
of these cases is there any threat to the materialist view of human beings,
but only different perspectives on the same chunk of spacetime. So
too, when Mary learns that it is like… this [however she might classify
the experience to herself] to see red, she is representing the qualitative
character of the experience from the introspective perspective using an
introspective concept, thereby generating a new finely-individuated fact,
even though the spacetime chunk she is representing from that highly distinctive
point of view is itself scientifically and naturalistically unremarkable.
The ineffability of “what it’s like”:
Ditto. When Mary represents the qualitative character of the experience
of red, or yellowy-orange, from the introspective perspective she mobilizes
an introspective concept, one that is proprietary to her introspector and
(for a reason I cannot go into here) does not translate into English or
any other natural language. Of course, the coarse-grained
fact that is being reported by her introspector can be expressed and described
in many ways, corresponding to many different fine-grained “facts”; it
is only the fine-grained fact incorporating the special introspective concept
that has no natural-language translation.
The “explanatory gap”: I agree that
the Gap is real. But this is for two reasons, neither of which embarrasses
materialism. First, as I have said, phenomenal information and facts
of “what it’s like” are ineffable. But one cannot explain what one
cannot express in the first place. (The existence of ineffable facts
is no embarrassment to science or to materialism, so long as they are fine-grained
“facts,” incorporating modes of presentation. It is the modes that
make them ineffable, not the underlying coarse-grained fact.) Second,
the Gap is not confined to consciousness in any sense or even to mind;
there are many kinds of intrinsically perspectival (fine-grained) facts
that cannot be explained. Pronominal modes of presentation again
serve as a good example. Suppose an opthalmologist explains why WGL
is nearsighted. That does nothing to explain why I am nearsighted;
nor could anyone or anything explain that—unless, of course, one first
conceded the identity of me with WGL.

6. Of course I do not expect anyone (yet) to
be convinced of my solutions to the six problems of phenomenal experience,
when all I have offered are cryptic summaries of them and without a hint
of argument. (I do hope you will be moved to go out and buy my books,
preferably in hardcover.) But my solutions are solutions,
in the sense that if correct they would solve the respective problems.
I believe each one is correct. I may be wrong in one or more cases
or even in all. But remember that the most difficult problems of
phenomenal experience are expressed as “how possibly” questions (“How could
a purely physical organism be directly acquainted with qualia?”; “How could
materialism permit the existence of intrinsically perspectival, ineffable
facts?”). A “here’s how possibly” answer must be treated with
respect unless and until it is refuted.
Of course, the solutions must be mutually consistent,
as (so far as I can see) mine are. But I hope I have gone some way
toward persuading you that each of the problems becomes more tractable
once it has been carefully distinguished from the others.

1 This talk was originally entitled “Cognitive Theories of
Consciousness.” Thanks to Martin Davies and to Manuel Liz for their
excellent comments on it at the ICCS_99 conference.

2 This theme has also been emphasized, and well documented,
by Block (1995) and by Chalmers (1996).
Baars (1995) rejoins against Block that “[w]hether consciousness is
a ‘mongrel problem’ or purebred is an empirical question” (p. 249).
He gives the example of cancer, which for a time was considered a false
natural kind but, he says, is now again regarded as “the same underlying
dysfunction, expressed by different pathways and in different tissues”
(p. 249). True or not, this squarely misses the point: Different
senses of “consciousness” may be found empirically to have the same referent,
but that would be—just that—an empirical discovery, not something to be
simply assumed or even to be established by a priori argument.

3 For the record, I myself believe that the Knowledge Arguments’
conclusion is equivocal. On one reading, it is entirely unproven
and the arguments are simply unsound; on the other, it is proven and true,
but not terribly interesting and in particular no threat to materialist
theories of mind. See Lycan (1996), Chs. 3 and 5.

4 For a wonderful discussion of the temporal anomalies, see
Chs. 5 and 6 of Dennett (1991).

5 See also Block (1993) and Goldman (1993).

6 Lycan (1987), (1996). I will not rehearse any of
the arguments for the positions, but you may take my word for it that they
are decisive.